OPEN: Cloudreach Event

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone at Skyhold
WHAT: Cloudreach showers bring weird shit.
WHEN: Cloudreach 15 onward
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: For information about the illness, its effects, and its cure, please make sure to also read the OOC Post.

This high in the mountains, snowstorms are to be expected. But this one is large and lingering, hanging over the valley and the fortress for days. In Skyhold, with its eternal spring, the snow becomes rain before it hits the ground, leaving inhabitants and visitors to wade through puddles and mud in the courtyards. In the valley, snow and ice accumulate under cloud cover—and worse, when the clouds finally thin, a whole winter's accumulation of snow begins to melt in the sunlight.

Within a day, the ground is sodden and mucky enough to give the survivors of the Fallow Mire (or Ferelden in general) unpleasant flashbacks, and those who live in tents are issued additional hastily-constructed wooden pallets to raise their floors above the mud. It is worse outside the fortress: streams and rivers have overflowed their banks, rapids run twice as fast as normal, and flash flooding has made even road travel treacherous.

On Cloudreach 17 a mudslide buries the pass into Skyhold from the west, and on the 19th a sheet of snow loosened from a mountainside collapses into the shadowed passage from the east. An Inquisition supply caravan is caught in the latter, scattering wagons and goods across the hillside and leaving a dozen people and horses in need of rescue and medical care.

Healers may find themselves stretched thin, as in addition to the usual rash of blisters and sniffles that come from days of rain and flooding, an illness begins to sweep through Skyhold's ranks from around the 16th onward. It's marked first by climbing fever, then by flashes at the edges of vision—green light and jagged formations that aren't there, beings of light and shadow gathering around people or clustering in corners—and distant voices, coherent for brief moments if you're quiet and still and not trying too hard to listen.

Comments

[ombranera]

"Fairly well. The Kestrels are coming along, the Wardens are settling in their camp, I no longer drink myself to sleep every other night- in fact I have not done so for the better part of a month." He's proud of himself for that in no small way. Settling back into his skin and bones took time, too work. But here? He had both aplenty.

[noleechesneeded]

"The sleeping better is especially good news," he said. "I...well, you probably don't want to discuss it. But I've been worried. So I'm glad to hear you've been doing better..."

Pulling up poor memories wasn't Simon's intention, but there was no neat way to explain his concern. Or if there was Simon wasn't smooth enough to think of it.

[ombranera]

"What, the drinking in the barn and moping about the battlements?" He could laugh at it now that he was well. Mostly well. Relatively well. He was ill but he wasn't desperate for some proof this was real any longer.